'Best days of our lives'

Clare Connor: a summer to remember © Getty Images

If Bryan Adams was a cricket fan, he could surely bring his rock hit Summer of `69 up to date. This season truly was, in his words, "the best days of our lives".

For us it all took place in August under a baking sun, during a Test and one-day series against South Africa. On a Taunton pitch that had yielded 1,500 runs for only 16 wickets in the previous week's Championship match against Northants, England women beat South Africa by an innings and 96 runs, our highest recorded Test win since 1934. That record needs a little explaining. As our Tests take place over only four days and represent a very small part of our international schedule - we play only one or two a year - wins are hard to attain. We play most of our home Tests at Shenley, a beautiful archetypal English setting in Hertfordshire, and Taunton. Both are renowned as great batting tracks, often yielding massive scores and few wickets.

It is a sign of a great summer when a team's highlights are almost too numerous to mention. Here are a few though, starting with Claire Taylor's batting average of 150 in the two-Test series. Scores of 177 and 133 rewarded her tireless work which began in 2000 when she left her IT job to concentrate on becoming one of the best batsmen in the world. She is well on the way.

We set ambitious targets for ourselves in the ODI series. Aware that South Africa are not as strong as Australia or New Zealand, we knew we had to score more than 250 against them to get ourselves into the right habits and prepare ourselves for topping 220 against the stronger two sides. As skipper, my highlight of the summer was to see the team rise to those targets bravely and not be intimidated by them. Laura Newton, promoted to open the batting, finished the three-match ODI series with an impressive average of 85 and Lucy Pearson continued her amazing winter form to take 19 wickets on unhelpful decks.

Wins in both the Test and ODI series ought to be enough to make anyone's summer. But there was another, more parochial, highlight: lifting the Frizzell County Championship trophy for the first time in its 15-year history. Yes, both Sussex skippers end this historic summer looking forward to their date with Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace.

The November 2003 edition of The Wisden Cricketer is on sale at all good newsagents in the UK and Ireland, priced £3.25. Click here to subscribe.

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